Bus siege children released in Manila

Last updated at 08:30 30 March 2007

A man who took a bus load of children and teachers hostage from his day-care centre in Manila today freed them after a 10-hour standoff that he used to denounce corruption and demand better lives for impoverished children.

Clutching dolls and backpacks, the children began filing off the bus shortly after 7pm local time, as Jun Ducat had promised in a rambling message delivered via a loudspeaker hours earlier.

The man identified as Jun Ducat, a 56-year-old civil engineer who has staged other attention-grabbing stunts in the past, then put the pin back in a grenade, handed it to a provincial governor and surrendered.

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Earlier in the seige, 31 other children between the ages of four and six and two teachers were held in the bus, parked outside Manila City Hall and surrounded by elite police teams and thousands of onlookers.

Ducat said he would surrender if he was promised that 145 children at the day care centre in the poor suburb of Tondo were provided with education, television reports said.

He also demanded to be allowed to speak on television and he was handed a mobile telephone patched on to local networks.

"I am so sorry I took these children in a violent action to call the attention of the Filipino people to open their minds to the political reality," Ducat said.

"There's so much corruption in the country. We're number one in Asia in corruption," he said in a speech which lasted for at least 15 minutes.

"I am calling on the Filipino people to stop the rotten political system. Don't rely on the politicians for your future. No one can help you but yourselves."

The children were to be taken on a field trip to a nearby town when the bus was seized. Although the drama dragged on for hours and the bus was parked in the open under a harsh sun, they did not seem to be in discomfort.

Television showed the children waving when curtains on the bus windows were pulled aside. At one stage, a policeman delivered cartons of ice-cream.

Ducat was probably the man of the same name who took two priests hostage in the late 1980s after a dispute over building a church, television reports said. In that incident, the weapons used turned out later to be fake and no one was harmed.

According to other reports, he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2001 and opened the Tondo day care centre three years ago.